Page 72 of Thin Ice

The schedule said down at two, so I slept. I iced the ribs before and after, plus every twenty minutes while I was awake. I lay on top of a rented comforter in a room with drawn blinds and told my body the same thing I'd told it before a thousand games: you know how to do the rest.

It didn't believe me at first. The pillow was wrong, and the light through the blinds came from the wrong side. Every time I drifted, some piece of the morning surfaced: gravel under tires or the grass coming up at me. I'd be wide awake again with my heart racing.

Then, when I drifted for the fourth time, I slept.

I woke at ten to four, not knowing where I was. Then I heard Elias speaking on the phone. He was ordering dinner from a restaurant, and the day came back to me.

Dinner came in a bag delivered to the door. He ordered pasta and a container of bitter greens that he knew I liked. It wasn't food from a frozen tray. It was real food the night before the biggest game of my life.

We ate at the kitchen table. Elias piled the pasta and greens onto plates and gave us real silverware instead of the plastic that came with the food.

When I had only two bites left, he began to talk.

"Forest Park," Elias said. "You asked me how he knew the path."

"I did."

"I'm going to tell you everything I know."

I nodded.

"There's a clinician at Tarn's facility here. His name is Colin Frey. He ran my tour of the clinic. Frey knew my published work. We talked shop for two hours, and it was the best professional conversation I'd had in four years."

He gathered our plates and took them to the sink while he kept talking. "I also met him at a hotel bar on Euclid. Then he invited me to a diner in Boston, two blocks from the team hotel, the morning of Game Three. We've had four or five calls in between. Every time, he gave me something useful for the investigation. It was all true and verifiable."

"And you sent what he wanted back the other way," I said.

Elias sat at the table again. "I did. At the bar, he asked how a thirty-four-year-old does load management in a run like this, and I told him you have your own regimen. I called it the best self-built maintenance program I'd ever seen up close. I used the word disciplined. On another call, I told him you were up before five every morning." He took a breath. "When Tierney's name surfaced, Frey offered to put a feeler out to the other old technicians. I spelled out the name for him."

He kept going.

"I can't confirm talking about the route. I don't remember saying Forest Park out loud, but I can't swear I didn't."

He stopped there. It was the end of his story.

Fourteen years of media training taught me what a man looked like when he was managing information. He rationed eye contact. Elias's report was honest, with no deflections.

He started to say something about Seattle, and I interrupted. "Elias, you're forgiven."

It came out of me almost without thought, and it cost me nothing.

He started to speak again. "I—"

I didn't let him say it. I had my own story to tell. "Thirteen years ago," I said, "in Pittsburgh, I stood in a hotel hallway with two buckets of ice and told a dying kid I'd see him at breakfast."

Elias didn't move. He closed his mouth and was still.

"Ty Hawkins. You've seen the file. I knew him." I looked at my hands. "He was nineteen and grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He called his mother twice a week and texted his sister every day. There was a St. Christopher medal in his shaving kit, saying it was from his grandmother. He had a dry sense of humor, and it was everyone's favorite thing about him. The coaches assigned him to me unofficially. They told me to keep an eye on him. I was only twenty-one, but they thought that made a world of difference. I took it seriously, making sure he ate right and didn't run with the wrong guys on the road."

The refrigerator hummed behind Elias. I kept my eyes on my hands.

"That January, he started to talk about things in weird ways. It wasn't a conversation. He just floated things. After a Saturday practice, he asked me if it was normal to feel like you were standing a little outside yourself. He laughed when he said it. I was peeling tape off a stick, and I told him the season's a grind and everybody gets weird when we get close to February. He said yeah, probably."

Elias got up and started coffee in an old-fashioned coffee maker. I continued my story. "In the airport in Tampa, he asked if I ever forgot the drive home from the rink. He meant not remembering it at all. I said sure, all the time. We all zone out sometimes." I flexed my fingers. "On a charter, he asked me if the stuff they were giving him in the training room was the same stuff they were giving me. His cup had the number nine on it. Mine said seventeen. I had a magazine on my chest and I was half asleep, and I said I assumed so. I asked him if it was working. He said it was working great. Then he looked out the window for the rest of the flight."

"Sounds like he was a good kid," Elias said.

"Yeah. He was, and there's more. He sat at his stall too long after practice, staring into space. That happened two or three times a week, long enough that the equipment guys noticed. One of them was Ray Halloran. He was the best. Ty started calling his mother less. For the last two road trips, he stopped reading on the plane. Before that, the kid read everything."